Covid vs Covid
New treatment for SARS-CoV-2
Svetlana Maslova, Hi-tech+
The new therapy works very elegantly: SARS-CoV-2 increases the amount of "medicine" – a modified version of the virus, but this is what blocks the replication of the pathogen. The new approach has already reduced the viral load by 95% in 12 hours.
Article by Yao et al. A synthetic defective interfering SARS-CoV-2 is published in PeerJ – VM.
The concept of self-destruction of SARS-CoV-2 was developed by scientists from University of Pennsylvania. They created a synthetic defective copy of SARS-CoV-2, which prevents the real pathogen from multiplying in the body, according to a press release from Fighting COVID with COVID. Experiments have shown that SARS-CoV-2 promotes replication and propagation of a synthetic copy created in the laboratory, but as a result of this interaction, the real pathogen dies.
The effect is achieved due to the fact that the genome of the defective SARS-CoV-2 works like a parasite. It uses for its own purposes the mechanism of the genome of the original SARS-CoV-2 and thereby can disrupt the process of its spread. In addition, the shorter genome of the modified versions allows them to replicate faster, thereby actively displacing the pathogen.
The lab-created version of SARS-CoV-2 replicated three times faster than the original. At the first stages of experiments on African green monkeys, the viral load was reduced by 50% in 24 hours.
"Such a result is not enough for therapeutic purposes," the scientists explain. "We needed to improve the delivery system." In another preprint of the work, which has not yet been published, the team used nanoparticles as a delivery vector. This approach reduced the amount of virus by 95% within 12 hours.
"Additional research and refinement of therapy will allow us to use our approach as a self-sustaining agent against COVID–19," said the author of the work, Marco Archetti. His team is currently testing the method on various strains of SARS-CoV-2 on human cells.
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